Worlds Elsewhere

by Andrew Dickson

  A new phrase, unser Shakespeare, had entered the language. Its translation is simple: ‘our Shakespeare’.

  ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-NINE YEARS after the tercentenary, almost to the day, I was scrambling up a hill in northern Poland, trying to see if unser Shakespeare went back any further than 1864. It was here, apparently, that Germany had first made Shakespeare’s acquaintance.

  I had first come to Poland in 2011 to report for the Guardian on the building of a new Shakespeare theatre in Gdańsk. When I’d arrived it was to little more than a field of splintered rubble and icy mud. The scheme had been on the cards at least since the millennium, but the contractors had got little further than clearing the site and digging a medium-sized ditch.

  Professor Jerzy Limon of Gdańsk University, whose brainchild this new ‘Teatr Szekspirowski’ was, did his best to entertain the visiting English journalist, crunching around the wind-whipped site in order to show me where the main stage would be – right here! – and where the audience would sit – over there! Still, it was obvious that the projected opening date, in time for Gdańsk’s annual Shakespeare festival in August 2013, was beyond even his considerable powers of invention.

  Searching for a story to put in the paper, I realised – far later than I admitted to my editors back in London – that this was not the first Shakespearian theatre to have been built in the city. I was dimly aware that English actors had toured across mainland Europe in the early years of the seventeenth century, but what I hadn’t known was that they were said to have constructed a playhouse in Gdańsk some time between 1600 and 1612. This was squarely within Shakespeare’s own lifetime, a period covering nearly all his mature plays – Hamlet, roughly, up to his final works for the stage, Henry VIII (1613) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613–14). The very site was under our feet, Limon assured me; though long since demolished, evidence of the building had been found when they excavated foundations for the new theatre. It seemed to check out. I wrote the article.

  Even before my visit was over, I knew I would have to come back: the idea of English actors tramping through the Baltic states, living on the hoof, performing at fairs and royal courts, taking Elizabethan drama out into the world, was too compelling to ignore. If Shakespeare’s plays really had been performed in Gdańsk, it would be the first time they had definitively been staged outside England, and within the playwright’s lifetime to boot. Forget enticing legends about Hamlet and Richard II in Sierra Leone: here, surely, was where Shakespeare began to go global.

  What I had discovered in the interim about the German adoration for an English playwright had only sharpened my eagerness to return. While 1864 may have been the year the concept of unser Shakespeare gained wide circulation, it was here in the far north, two and a half centuries earlier, that Germany’s relationship with Shakespeare first took root. Though this had been Polish territory since the defeat of the Nazis, Gdańsk /Danzig had always had a Germanic identity – the city was German-speaking and for hundreds of years had been as intimate with powerful German principalities as it was with Warsaw. If my story began anywhere, I suspected it was here.

  Eighteen months after my first visit, I got in touch with Limon and asked if I could return to Gdańsk and see where his theatre was up to. He enthusiastically agreed.

  So here I was, on top of a hill. Gradually, I gained the summit. Snow lay in sooty scurfs by the path, and the earth, still half-frozen, was an unwashed brown. Above me there was a cross: two hulking trusses of unfinished steel, sixteen metres high. The sky was the blue of raw silk, scratched with cat’s claws of white. Breath clouded in front of my face in ragged powder-puffs. My lungs felt bruised by the air.

  Far below, the town looked dainty, almost too perfect – a confection of needling spires and steeples, scattered among a forest of sharply etched triangular roofs. One by one, I ticked off the landmarks: the double-hatted steeple of Gdańsk’s main church; just in front, the Hanseatic spire of the town hall, scrolled and corbelled, closing to a sharp point. Its clock was almost legible in the pewtery morning light. Visible on the horizon was a thin trace of sea.

  Wriggling off a glove with my teeth, I yanked a creased paperback book from my pocket. It contained a black-and-white reproduction of an engraving of Gdańsk made in 1620, soon after the English actors raised their theatre here. It was a panorama of the city taken from a vantage point somewhere to the south-west, labelled in parallel Latin and German: Dantiscum, Danzig.

  Holding the book out, I attempted to line up history with reality. Even in blurry miniature, it was a remarkably accurate facsimile. St Mary’s church – legendarily the largest brick-built church in the world – was there, its forked steeple unmistakable, as was the town hall. The defensive wall had long gone, and in place of the unpaved road depicted in my engraving there was now a six-lane highway. To the left, there was a whole other city of teetering spires and towers: the cranes of Gdańsk’s renowned shipyards, cradle of Poland’s anti-communist movement. I could just about see the hulls of ships in dry dock and on them glittering pinpricks of light – welders, I supposed. Every so often a crane moved, a spider-leg patiently adjusting its foothold.

  But on the whole, despite the welders and the shipyards and the highway, the image in my hand and the scene beyond slipped into each other surprisingly well: identical, almost. Only the colours – roofs toffee-coloured, a gleam of verdigris – looked new.

  They had at least filled in the ditch. In fact Gdańsk’s Teatr Szekspirowski had progressed much further: what had been little more than an open site in the centre of town now contained a sleek concrete structure, perhaps a hundred metres long, with a shallow fly tower poking above the roofline. Stark grey, lacking its dark cladding of chocolate-coloured brick, it looked like a naval frigate that had slipped its moorings at the shipyard and drifted up the Motława river.

  Limon seemed barely older, still full of boyish enthusiasm. He stood waiting by the perimeter fence, his high-visibility vest harmonising oddly with his bottle-green tweed jacket and gleaming brown leather shoes. Despite the unruly flourish of white hair, he looked as youthful and earnest as ever. But his manner was graver and the lines under his eyes firmly etched. It had been a tough few years, I gathered. He smiled lopsidedly. ‘In a way of speaking.’

  As we queued for our hard hats, he filled me in: the first firm of builders had run up delays and been removed from the project. There was a running battle to try to recoup expenses. A seven-month pause while new contractors were arranged. And with the weather as unseasonably cold as it was …

  We looked down into a drainage channel filled with greenish-grey water and broken ice. It was roughly where a corridor in the backstage area should be.

  The complex would not now be ready until September 2014. But Limon seemed to take perverse delight in this adversity. ‘Bureaucracy, always bureaucracy in Poland. It is our abiding sin.’

  As a young English-Literature academic at the University of Gdańsk in the early 1980s, Limon had engaged in modest dissidence against Poland’s Soviet puppet government, burrowing in the town archives for evidence of Gdańsk’s historic links with the west. He published a book about troupes of actors who visited the city from Germany and beyond. Once communist rule was over, he began to hang around on Gdańsk’s punky and burgeoning fringe theatre scene. In 1993 he helped organise the city’s first Shakespeare Day, which evolved into a fully fledged international festival, staging performances in improvised spaces across town and the nearby cities of Gdynia and Sopot.

  Throughout that time he had a quiet but relentless ambition: to erect a permanent theatre devoted to Shakespeare, as physically proximate to the seventeenth-century playhouse as he could. For some people, the fact that the site had since become the car park of the Gdańsk branch of the Służba Bezpieczeństwa, Poland’s KGB, would have been discouraging. For Limon it was a provocation. There would be a nice irony in dispossessing a fleet of government-issue Polski Fiats and Syrenas and erecting a temple to the Bard. Eventuall
y, he got his way: the spooks were forced to park their cars elsewhere.

  The first thought had been to raise a replica somewhat like the Globe in London, but Gdańsk’s climate – snow on the ground for four months a year – had militated against it. Instead Limon and his architect had opted for a modern space, more flexible, which gestured at Elizabethan amphitheatres. It would have tiers of boxed galleries surrounding a thrust stage on three sides, which could also be adjusted into a proscenium arch as required. A subtle blend of new and old. The secret weapon was a sliding roof, which could be opened during the summer months for the full Globe-like effect.

  Impatient to play with his new toy, Limon had already hosted Hamlet while work was at a standstill, with a small cast of live performers and video projected on to the exposed concrete walls.

  ‘You should have seen the show,’ he said admiringly. ‘Transgeneric. Very powerful.’

  He was bursting with other plans: summer-long education projects, a new university department teaching arts administration. Not neglecting Gdańsk’s links with Britain, he had cajoled the Prince of Wales into being patron.

  If I’d met Limon under any other circumstances, I thought, I would have taken him for a dangerous fantasist. But all around us was the evidence of what a little fantasy could achieve.

  As I walked back, I turned over Limon’s scheme in my mind. Had there genuinely been a theatre built in this city during Shakespeare’s lifetime, or was this – like the involvement of the Prince of Wales – merely an astute piece of marketing? What kind of theatre was it? Built by whom? There was talk of the archaeological finds being displayed in the new building, but, with the backstage area still doing a decent impression of the North Pole, that was unlikely any time soon. Limon had offered to accompany me the following day to the town archives, where I hoped to glean more about Gdańsk’s Shakespearian past and the strolling actors who braved the Baltic.

  Inside a faceless modern complex around the corner from Solidarity headquarters, we were shown into a cramped and drab office. On the table were tight beige bundles of documents tied with legal tape. Limon proudly pointed to his signature on the front of one. It was dated 1976. Only three other names were on the list.

  Donning white gloves, we creaked the bundles cautiously open. Inside were letters, some in German, some in Latin, some a mixture. I peered at one, done in a businesslike italic hand: late-Elizabethan? early Jacobean? A professional scribe, that was for sure. The ink was clear and dark, the paper looked almost new.

  On the reverse was the signature of Elizabeth I, a vaunting construction nearly three inches high, with an extravagant pennant on the summit of the ‘b’ and more wiggly underlining than would be permitted in a teenage girl’s schoolbook. Ploddingly, I worked out the date: December 1566, Regni vero nostri Nono, ‘the ninth year of our true reign’. Shakespeare would have been two and a half.

  At this point, Gdańsk was perhaps the largest city in the Baltic region and one of the most influential in Europe, home to 75,000 people – modest compared to London, which had a population of 200,000 by 1600, but still significant. Perfectly positioned for ship-borne trade, it was home to a vigorous mercantile community in contact with Denmark, Sweden, Flanders, France, Spain, Portugal and much further beyond. Thousands upon thousands of tons of wood and grain went out from Gdańsk, and ships from across Europe streamed in for the access it provided to central European markets.

  Gdansk had never been more cosmopolitan – nor richer – than during the Renaissance. Długi Targ, the long market in the centre of town, is still lined by swaggering Hanseatic mansions – fantastical, many-gabled creations finished in toothsome colours of pink and marzipan yellow, carefully reconstructed after bomb damage in the second world war. In the National Museum a few streets away from my hotel (which had once housed the Dutch consulate) was further proof of Gdańsk’s overseas connections: a vast triptych of the Last Judgment by the Flemish artist Hans Memling, commissioned for a Medici church in Florence but seized by a privateer from Gdańsk who won it after a sea battle with the English.

  Despite such conflicts as the Hanseatic War of 1469–74, England was, on the whole, a valuable ally. Gdańsk had long sat at an oblique angle from Catholic Poland, an arrangement formalised in 1457 when the Polish king granted it independent jurisdiction. Lutherans had brought German translations of the scriptures to Gdańsk as early as the 1530s, and it became a hotbed of the new faith, home to one of the few sixteenth-century Protestant gymnasiums to be built on the Continent (not dissimilar from the grammar school attended by Shakespeare). In 1577, irked by its semi-detached Lutheran lodger, the Polish crown attempted to invade. Eventually the rival forces came to a compromise: fealty and repatriation fees if Gdańsk could have its old freedoms back. The agreement largely persisted until the Prussian invasion of 1793.

  Little wonder the English found this bullishly independent port city congenial. In a side street off the main marketplace was Dom Angielski, the ‘English House’, built in 1568–70 – three years after Elizabeth signed that letter – as a centre for the English community in Gdańsk. It was a towering edifice in louring grey stone that would have looked more at home on the streets of Manchester than here in Poland. When it was raised, the English community was one of the largest outside England, perhaps 1,000 people strong, amplified by a substantial population of Scots.

  Limon riffled fast through the documents: communiqués about diplomacy and trade from Elizabeth, a Latin note from James I politely declining to furnish Gdańsk’s council with arms.

  All at once, we hit the jackpot: letters from the English actors who had visited. I scanned them greedily, trying to decode the German as best I could (which was badly, even with Limon’s help). Most were applications to the town council to perform in the city, generally during the annual St Dominic’s fair in August. With the brown-nosing formality that is a burdensome feature of Renaissance written communication, they repeatedly protested the players’ most excellent skill, and begged humbly to inform the authorities that the drama they performed, comedies and tragedies, was of the highest – and most moral – quality.

  They also disclosed more enticing nuggets of information. From a letter of August 1601 by a rival German company one could glean that English actors had begun to visit Gdańsk ‘a long time ago’, perhaps as early as the late 1580s. By 1600 or so the city had become a regular calling point for actors travelling north through the German states. The visitors were clearly admired: the same German company begged to inform the authorities, with a tart stab of envy, that ‘you may wish to see that we Germans have also learned a thing or two, and just as well as the English’.

  This wasn’t to say the English had it easy. In 1611, around the time The Tempest had its debut in London, one touring company appeared twice in Gdańsk. The players must have wondered why they’d bothered. On the first occasion they were forced to cut short their visit after struggling to drum up spectators; then, on their return, they had the opposite difficulty when an uninvited crowd burst into the theatre without paying, leaving them with no money (their letter lamented piteously) to pay the silk merchants who had made their costumes.

  Generally, however, visits went smoothly, implying that the inhabitants of this worldly and wealthy city took visiting performers to their hearts. English companies would come for the next fifty-odd years, through the Thirty Years’ War that tore apart Europe, beyond even the English Civil Wars and Cromwell’s closure of the theatres in 1642 back in Britain.

  At first the actors set up in a civic building at the top of Długi Targ, an undramatic brick hall now heavily restored. But from 1612 references begin to appear in the records to a permanent acting space located in what had been a Fechtschule or fencing school. Companies petitioned to play there; one referred to it as a publicum theatrum. Limon showed me an image in an engraving: a blocky wooden building, the size and appearance of a large cow barn, with an open roof and galleries just visible inside, perhaps two or three shallow s
toreys high.

  This was the evidence I was after. What made the building properly interesting was its resemblance to designs for the Fortune playhouse back in London, built in 1600 by the same architect-carpenter who had raised the Globe, Peter Street. Instead of the Globe’s polygonal, doughnut-like form, the Fortune, raised north of the Thames on the edge of Shoreditch, was, unusually, in a box shape. According to Street’s contract – which survives – it was 80 feet square (24.3 square metres) on the outside and 55 feet square (16.7 square metres) on the inside, made of ‘good stronge and substancyall timber’, with galleries in three storeys, equipped with seats. Its other features were to be constructed ‘in the manner and fashion of the saide howse Called the Globe’, one of which was the roofed stage that projected out into the middle of the space, around which the groundlings would hustle (though not too closely: Street was also instructed to surround it with iron ‘pykes’).

  No contemporaneous images survive of the London Fortune, once described as ‘the fairest playhouse in this town’. But if the information in the archives was accurate, it had a twin right here in Gdańsk, accommodating 1,000 spectators, 1,000 miles from the original. The best guess was that some kind of specification had been brought out from London and constructed locally: not difficult, in a shipbuilding city with skilled craftsmen and plentiful timber. Even the connection with fencing was in character – the same went for many Jacobethan playhouses, where displays of dazzling skill with rapiers and swords were part of the attraction.

  The London Fortune’s name proved unlucky. The theatre burnt down in 1621 and was replaced by a brick building, itself torn down in the anti-theatrical 1640s; whatever rubble survived the Blitz is now buried somewhere beneath the brutalist concrete of the Barbican (whose 1970s arts centre I had haunted the previous summer, during the World Shakespeare Festival).